I’m a generalist SysAdmin. I use Linux when necessary or convenient. I find that when I need to upgrade a specific solution it’s often easier to just spin up an entirely new instance and start from scratch. Is this normal or am I doing it wrong? For instance, this morning I’m looking at a Linux VM whose only task is to run Acme.sh to update an SSL cert. I’m currently upgrading the release. When this is done I’ll need to upgrade acme.sh. I expect some kind of failure that will require several hours to troubleshoot, at which point I’ll give up and start from scratch. I’m wondering if this is my ignorance of Linux or common practice?
It depends on what you need to upgrade/do. I usually upgrade stuff, but at the same time I also have templates in case I quickly need to spin up something new.
If that’s the case, I seed the new instance whatever conf files are needed and I am up and running quickly. Consider that in my work environment we rarely use containers (more of a philosophy at this point than a real reason, since we also have a relatively big K8s cluster for big data).
Linux sysadmin here, for the past 25 years.